Radar target recognition method with MUSIC algorithm: Application to aircraft targets with measured scattered data

This paper demonstrates the usefulness of an ultra wideband target recognition method in the case of realistic and complicated target geometries at resonance region. The method utilizes the MUSIC algorithm to extract the natural resonance-related scattering features of targets. The resulting features give the power distribution maps of targets. These maps are called as fused MUSIC spectrum matrices and used as the main target recognition feature in the method. The fusion process is needed to reduce the aspect dependency of target features, which increases the accuracy rate of the classifier. In this paper, the method is applied to classify three small-scale aircraft targets. It is demonstrated that the method provides high accurate classification rates although the target geometries are highly complex, the measured scattered data is incomplete and only a few different reference aspects are used in recognition design process.